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Johan Joubert

Biography

Johan Joubert is an African whose ancestry dates back to 1688 when Pierre Jaubert landed in the Cape of Good Hope as a French Huguenot. Although Pierre was illiterate, Johan had the privilege of finishing his Masters and PhD in Industrial Engineering at the University of Pretoria, albeit more than 300 years later: so much for progress! Johan's PhD focused on developing self-regulating and intelligent algorithms embedded in heuristics to solve Vehicle Routing and Scheduling variants. After a few years in the production environment and consulting, he currently heads up the Optimization Group within the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He is also appointed as contract researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. His objective is to ensure that models, although being wrong most of the time, are useful to decision makers, and reliable in supporting decision making. For the remaining hours of the day he succeeds in surviving, and enjoys living as the alpha male in a house with five females.

email : Johan.Joubert@up.ac.za

Organization

On February 8 this year (2008), the University of Pretoria officially celebrated its 100th birthday, marking a century in the service of knowledge. UP is the leading research producing university in South Africa and have a total student body in excess of 55000, of which nearly 40000 are contact students. The university offers academic programmes in nine faculties, one of which is the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology. The Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Pretoria is the oldest and biggest (student wise) Industrial Engineering department in South Africa. The first Industrial Engineers graduated from the University of Pretoria in 1963. Up to 1974 Industrial Engineering was offered as a program in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 1975 the Department of Industrial Engineering was established as an independent academic department. At undergraduate level the department offers a four-year Bachelors degree in Industrial Engineering. At graduate level the department offers Honours, Masters and Doctoral degrees in Industrial Engineering (http://www.up.ac.za/ie)